Over a weekend in early August 2020, the Dark Sky app went dead on Android phones. People who tried to open it got a message: the “app has shut down.”
Nobody was caught off guard. Apple bought Dark Sky in March, and the developers said then that Android and Wear OS support would end. In the blog post announcing the deal, they said joining Apple meant they could “reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.” Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, was not part of that plan.
The cutoff was first set for July 1. It was extended by a month and then went ahead as scheduled on Aug. 1.
The app was not the only casualty. Developers on both iOS and Android had used Dark Sky’s API for weather data in their own apps, and that is being retired as well. They have until the end of 2021 to find and set up another source.
Dark Sky’s website survived the weekend. Its web version was due to close on the day the Android app’s shutdown was reported, but Apple pushed that deadline back and turned off embeds. No new date has been given. For now, Android users can still check the forecast in a browser.
